Category Archives: animation

The rain has already started here this morning and we are soon expecting the wind.

Hope you are all keeping an eye out if you are in the storm track and please take care of yourselves. here’s a chance that we’ll lose power and the blog will be down, but as long as I can I’ll keep it up.

But the animations the weather shows are presenting have rainstorms crossing over us… apparently we’re about as far to the west as any of this will reach and I can’t imagine it will be like a nor’easter or a tropical hurricane.

To make sure what’s happening however, I’m hanging out the Weather Forecasting Stone:

I have absolute confidence in the stone’s accuracy. Don’t you wish you had one?

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President Obama’s campaign released a new video made up entirely out-of-context clips of Mitt Romney, intended to show how the Romney campaign’s attack on Obama’s 14 year old “redistribution” comment was unfair. The Romneyites have been releasing Obama’s old statements without including the complete context, thus making him criticizable. If the same thing is done to Romney, the results change the Republican’s entire campaign.

Saturday, in the early afternoon having returned home after my WSHC show, I had a seizure walking up the basement stairs from the laundry. The next time I knew anything, I was being rolled into an MRI at Jefferson County Hospital.

Everything else, to me, is blank.

It looks like I fell down the stairs, hit the concrete floor and slid over to a wall with a stack of paintings on it.

Fortunately, Elly was just returning home and heard the thud. When she found me she couldn’t wake me up so she called 911. They got me to Jefferson.

Any movement on my left side or moving my left arm meant excruciating pain. I screamed a lot. JCH then decided I needed specialty trauma care abd sent me down to Inova Fairfax in Virginia… a place if you were my worst enemy I would NOT send you.

I finally got out last night. Now comes six months of healing and pain reduction.

So much has been pointed out lately, through television commentaries and new legislation, about Congressmen and Senators entering office as middle-class individuals and leaving office as millionaires by using secret investment information they learn at work.

What would happen if their reelection campaigns listed the things they had done for their constituents AND said they had earned no unethical investment income and are happy with the income they make on their salaries and, say, speaking engagements?

Don’t expect to hear it. Politicians seek reelection in order to continue making money, either legally or illegally. It doesn’t matter if they are Democrats or Republicans or Independents. It’s all the same.

Frankly, I’d vote for the candidate who promised ton do the job he was elected for and not focus on his retirement wallet. And party wouldn’t matter…much.

Richard “Dick” Beals was an Americanvoice actor who performed many voices in his career, spanning the period from the early 1950s into the 21st century. He specialized primarily in doing the voices of young boys. He was well known as Davey in the Davey and Goliath animations.

Perhaps his most recognizable characterization was the voice of the stop-motion animation figure called “Speedy Alka-Seltzer“, featured in TV ads for more than 50 years….

Anyone who has had children in the last few decades knows who Maurice Sendak was. The amazing children’s author and illustrator published the kind of kids books that did so much more than just tell stories… they stimulated the imagination and bonded parents to kids as they read together.

The boys we had expected from Shepherd to help us carry out more boxes were kept away by a combination of sports practice and a paper assignment, so the two old people (me and Elly) who need the carrying strength lost another weekend of mass moving.

We’ll do more of the “this ‘n that” level of packing and moving by carload during the week and hope to get our carriers next weekend.

Meanwhile, our kitchen is pretty much set up and operating in the new house:

:)

Anyway, maybe we’ll be done before the end of April and can get the Town House on the market.

I was supposed to be at WSHC at 7:30 this morning to cover for John Case until 9:00 AM, but somehow I missed the alarm and slept too late… and if Ralph Petrie hadn’t called at 8:30 to see where John was I never would have gotten in.

At 7:55 I was on the air and my regular callers (especially Ralph, whose birthday is today… Happy Birthday, Ralph) started ringing in. I held the show an extra half hour to make up for the lateness.

I had a therapist’s appointment a little later… then I got home, fed the dogs and, dammit, fell asleep until 4:00 PM. Now I’m getting a really late start on my house packing and kitchen cleaning, etc.

We’re supposed to be trucking the furniture and boxes to the new house on Saturday and Sunday. We’ll never make it!

This has been nominated for a short filmAcademy Award and I think it is surely worth it. Make sure to watch it at full screen.

Have a great time… more fun than watching politicians.
For those of you who are my radio listeners I’ll be on WSHC (89.7 FM) tomorrow morning from 7:30 AM to 9:00 AM substituting for John Case(on the web at http://www.897wshc.org).

As a young teenager I became a regular reader of Ronald Searle‘s wonderful illustrated books about Nigel Molesworth (especially Down With Skool!) and the other British schoolboys at St. Custards and the schoolgirls of St. Trinians who turned up in comic films as well.

…behind the humorist illustrator was a man of much darker vision who could find sharp things to say about global poverty, paedophilia or the war on terror, and could plumb the depths of an almost Boschian disgust with the cruelties and excesses of his fellow man — as seen for example in a sketch entitled In Fashion, featuring maimed and wailing women walking down a catwalk. In this more Swiftian guise, Searle was credited with influencing many leading artists and illustrators, including Gerald Scarfe .

Much of Searle’s work was profoundly influenced by his experiences during the war. As he himself often explained, his experience of the “horror, the misery, the blackness” of a Japanese prisoner of war camp had “changed the attitude to all things, including humour”.

Ronald Searle

British illustrator Ronald Searle went to art school in Cambridge and during WWII was working as a draftsman with the Brisits Army and Singapore. His unity was captured by the Japanese and spent 3 and a half years as a prisoner, unltimately ending up as a slave laborer in 1943 on the Burma Railway.

…he rejected what he called the “jolly good chaps” account given in David Lean’s film Bridge on the River Kwai for providing a false picture of camaraderie in the face of adversity. Searle had been sent to work on the railway in 1943 after he and two other inmates had begun producing a magazine to boost the morale of the prisoners. “It upset the extremely conservative mentalities of our own administration — the commanders and the chaplains,” he recalled with some bitterness. “When the time came for the Japanese to say we want groups to be sent up north, the English chose the troublemakers.” For Searle, the bridge remained the place “where I lost all my friends”.

Searle was also known for posters, animations and other illustrations. The opening credit animation for Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines was Searle’s work.

Bill Tchakirides

Would you believe that this old man in West Virginia was once a Broadway Producer, or a Commercial Food Photographer, or a Justice of the Peace, or a Font Designer, or even a Director of a major non-profit Arts Program on Cape Cod? Well, he was. Now he spends most of his time posting in the blogosphere and looking for things to do (retirement is a bitch).
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I am a Liberal

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.
What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor."
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